


1, 2, 3, 4, tell me that you love me more

by tahariel



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Childhood Friends, Friendship, Gen, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-19
Updated: 2012-03-19
Packaged: 2017-11-02 04:52:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/365183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tahariel/pseuds/tahariel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raven’s never had somebody to tuck her in before. She doesn’t really need it now, but Charles seems to want very badly to do it for her, to pull the thick, heavy blankets over her body and smooth them flat with the palm of his hand, not very much bigger than her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1, 2, 3, 4, tell me that you love me more

Raven’s never had somebody to tuck her in before. She doesn’t really need it now, but Charles seems to want very badly to do it for her, to pull the thick, heavy blankets over her body and smooth them flat with the palm of his hand, not very much bigger than her own. “There,” he says, sounding satisfied, and smiles at her with so much pleasure that she doesn’t roll onto her side the way she would prefer, for fear it might crease the covers. “You can sleep here, and in the morning I’ll ask Cook to make us some breakfast, okay?”

  


“Okay,” she says quietly, dares a smile in return and is rewarded by the way his face lights up.

  


“Night night,” Charles says, this strange boy with the floppy hair and the affection-starved eyes, and then, jerky, as though he’s doing it before he can think better of it, he bends and kisses her on the forehead, a wet press of lips that feels strange against her scales. “Sleep tight.”

  


She shudders. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” It hurts something awful.

  


“There aren’t any here,” he says, and leaves her alone in this enormous bed, surely large enough for five street kids to lie in side by side without having to jostle each other too much, this huge room with its blue-painted walls and velvet curtains, warm and, strangely, safe. She can tell when he falls asleep because the gentle clasp of his mind - his  mind -  relaxes around hers, like a hand holding to her fingers, laced together.

  


She rolls onto her side and tucks her knees up to her chest in the soft cotton nightshirt he’s lent her, and sighs, rubs her cheek into the pillow - it’s soft, too, but not because it’s been washed too many times, because it’s supposed to be - and goes to sleep.

  


In the morning there is a scream when the maid finds her there, a little blue demon tangled in the bedding and fighting to get away, panicking and screaming back until Charles comes racing in and the maid stops screaming, eyes glazing over until she suddenly smiles, all gentle warmth, and asks Raven if she would like some juice.

  


“What did you do?” she asks Charles when the woman has gone, staring at him with wide eyes and crouched on the far side of the room, hands wrapped up tight around her head to protect herself. He’s leant against the wall, two fingers still pressed to his temple and panting as though he’s been running from the police, hair clinging with sweat to his pallid forehead. 

  


“I’ll look after you,” he says instead of answering, and when he slides down to sit on the floor, still breathing hard, Raven crawls under the bed and emerges from the other side to tuck herself in against him, tentative until his arm curls around her shoulders and he tilts his head to rest against hers.

  


————— 

  


“Maybe it would be best if you were pink around other people,” Charles says apologetically, though, after the third time, and by now he’s looking so pale and drained that she just nods, even though she’s disappointed to have to put on a mask again when he had promised, had  promised . And then Raven is pink and - and  normal looking, but he smiles at her and tells her she’s pretty, and she flushes with pleasure and doesn’t mind quite as much.

  


————— 

  


Charles’ Mama just accepts her as though she’s always been there, without comment except for Raven’s mucky knees where she and Charles have been running around in the garden like children half their age and falling into the flowerbeds. 

  


Raven never is quite certain whether Charles planted memories there or whether Sharon really just didn’t notice.

  


—————

  


School, though - 

  


School is harder.

  


There’s only so much Charles can do for her there, when he’s at the Junior High next door and she’s stuck in Elementary School with all of these bleating little boys and girls who wouldn’t know how to survive on their own if you airlifted them into the middle of a McDonald’s and gave them a dollar. Not only that, but all of them know how to spell and read properly and count, all the things she never got a chance to learn. It’s incredibly frustrating, not least because her teachers all think Raven is dim. 

  


She tries not to snap her pencils in half with her fingers, but it’s difficult not to when the other kids are all making fun of her as she tries to follow the lesson and not cry with humiliation when the teacher asks her a question and then immediately says ‘never mind’ instead of waiting for her to even try and answer.

  


At night Charles tries to help her with her work, but she won’t let him just push the information into her brain - she wants to learn it for herself, she’s not a baby, she can do it - and he has his own work to do, so there’s only so much time he can spend tutoring her. Maisie brings them tall milkshakes up from the kitchen and plates of cookies, sometimes, pats Raven on the head and points out an elementary mistake in her mathematics homework that makes Raven want to scream that she’s not stupid.

  


“You’re not,” Charles says to her, “you’re not stupid,” and she snaps at him, “Stay out of my head, Charles!”

  


And he does.

  


—————

  


It makes it much harder to scream for him when three of the bigger boys corner her behind the gym and start pushing her around, laughing as she lashes out and misses, misses again - lucky them that she’s so off-balance, because if she’d connected she probably would have broken bone. Raven has always been stronger than she ought to be if she was a normal ten-year-old girl, even when she’s pink and pretending. “Look at the little dunce, I bet she can’t even count how many of us there are,” one of them guffaws, his ugly red face crumpling up with laughter like an old paper bag.

  


“Three,” Charles says from behind him, and punches the guy in the back of the head.

  


He carries Raven home like a baby, her schoolbag and his slung around his shoulders on either side of his body as she wraps her arms around his neck. He’s growing faster than she is these days, shot up into this gangly, man-shaped person seemingly overnight, though he’s probably not going to be tall and she’s probably too big for this now. Both of his eyes are blacked and swelling, but after he’d knocked the first one down Raven had taken out the second, and they’d taken the third down between them. Her lip is sore where it’s split from the blow of a random fist, and her feet and hands hurt, but she loves Charles so, so much.

  


“I beat up some little kids,” he says, amused, and looks down at her with humour in the curl at the corner of his mouth, though it has to be killing his back to haul her around like this. Raven would make herself smaller, but it’s never made her any lighter, so she just tries not to move too much.

  


“I’m a bad influence,” she says solemnly, and they both laugh hard enough that he nearly drops her.

  


—————

  


He’s her big brother in every way that matters, in every way but blood. And yet…

  


Charles isn’t really her brother, she realises sometime in her mid-to-late teens, when he’s grown into his shoulders and he smiles at her like that, like she’s beautiful and he loves her the way nobody else ever has.

  


There’s a weird pleasure in loving him  like that when she knows he doesn’t feel that way about her, a strange frisson of tingling anticipation every time they sit next to each other and he puts his arm around her, kisses her hair, shows her the work he’s doing for his college classes and asks her to go out with him and his friends. It makes her skin feel hypersensitive and longing, waiting always for the next touch, the next brush of skin to skin.

  


It’s this more than anything that makes her extract the promise not to read her mind from him, because while it’s enjoyable to love him from afar when he has no idea she feels like that, the thought of him recoiling - of spoiling it, spoiling everything, by stopping touching her, laughing with her, loving her - is too painful to bear. She’s going to slip up eventually, if he keeps dipping in and out of there like he’s living in her pocket, sharing everything and hiding nothing.

  


He stops inviting her out with him a little while after, and it takes Raven a while to realise it’s because he’s discovered girls.

  


She can’t help but resent him for finding a way to spoil everything anyway.

  


—————

  


Raven spends years following him around from college to college, finding work where she can and enjoying what little of Charles’ time is free between his coursework and his women, because she cannot stand the thought of staying alone in that big old house without him, or worse, leaving him, even though he is so preoccupied with his own future that he hasn’t realised that she doesn’t have one, not really. Raven never took to academia - started too late, and with too little encouragement to really care to try - and the only other respectable option for a woman is to marry, something she has little to no interest in.

  


Seriously, either Charles is going to have to mindwhammy some poor schmuck into not minding that his wife is blue, or she’s going to have to be pink  all the time for the rest of her life, not just when Charles isn’t freaking out about somebody maybe seeing her, and she’d rather have some time as herself than none at all.

  


Charles does love her, he does. He’s just - a man, and too used to his own privilege and position to remember that not everybody is as lucky as he is, no matter what he says about telepathy being a great leveller. Sometimes she thinks he forgets she’s even there, he blocks her out so thoroughly, and thinks about asking him back into her head, but by now her feelings are so deeply entrenched that there’s no way he wouldn’t find them instantly, his name engraved on her heart.

  


And then - 

  


And then, there is Erik.

  


—————

  


Erik prefers Charles over her, too, but she can live with that, if only he’ll let her be herself. And he wants her to be, says she’s beautiful when she’s blue, doesn’t wait until she’s put on her human face to tell her so. 

  


He doesn’t love her  that way either, but she has to take what she can get, and Raven had trained herself long before meeting Charles into taking advantage of the best offer that presents itself when it presents itself, lest it be removed from her grasp for hesitating.

  


So she does.

  


She regrets it for the rest of her life, because it’s only afterwards, when it’s too late to go back, that she realises that being loved like a sister was better than being loved for being blue, instead of being loved for being Raven. Oh, Erik isn’t cruel, and he would probably beat up children for her, too, but then he’s never put a plaster over her knee when she tripped into the rosebushes either, and curled up in the middle of the night to watch a horror movie that gives them both nightmares for days, popcorn between their sticky fingers and grease smeared on her face where Charles tried to cover her eyes through the scary parts.

  


Sometimes she thinks about going back to the mansion, about apologising and tucking herself back into life there as though she’d never left, because of course Charles would let her if she tried, would welcome her back with open arms because he’s a soft-hearted idiot, but she can’t bring herself to ask him for forgiveness she doesn’t deserve, when he’s already given her everything else.

  


_  
_

_One, two, three, four  
_ _Tell me that you love me more_  
 _Sleepless long nights_  
 _That is what my youth was for_  
  
 _Old teenage hopes are alive at your door_  
 _Left you with nothing but they want some more_  
  
 _Oh, you’re changing your heart_  
 _Oh, You know who you are_  
  
 _Sweetheart bitterheart now I can’t tell you apart_  
 _Cosy and cold, put the horse before the cart_  
  
 _Those teenage hopes who have tears in their eyes_  
 _Too scared to own up to one little lie_  
  
 _Oh, you’re changing your heart_  
 _Oh, you know who you are_  
  
 _One, two, three, four, five, six, nine, or ten_  
 _Money can’t buy you back the love that you had then_  
 _One, two, three, four, five, six, nine, or ten_  
 _Money can’t buy you back the love that you had then_  
  
 _Oh, you’re changing your heart_  
 _Oh, you know who you are_  
 _Oh, you’re changing your heart_  
 _Oh, you know who you are_  
 _Oh, who you are_  
  
 _For the teenage boys_  
 _They’re breaking your heart_  
 _For the teenage boys_  
 _They’re breaking your heart_

\- Feist, 1 2 3 4


End file.
